People walking in the nature might want to identify different objects and phenomena in nature, such as plants, mushrooms, stones, minerals, butterflies, insects, animals and phenomena in the sky. Localization of a place is another problem often faced with when trying to figure out where you are.
Trying to figure out where you are is probably one of the oldest pastimes of people. Navigation and positioning are crucial to so many activities and yet the process has always been quite cumbersome. Along with the increasing use of mobile stations, there are nowadays methods with which positioning or localisation can be performed.
GPS is the first positioning system to offer highly precise location data for any point on the planet, in any weather. The most important application of GPS is the simple determination of a “position” or “location”.
Technically, The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a worldwide radio-navigation system formed from a constellation of 24 satellites and their ground stations. The idea behind GPS is to use satellites in space as reference points for locations on earth. GPS uses the satellites as reference points to calculate positions accurate to a matter of meters, with advanced forms of GPS even measurements better than a centimeter can be made. These days GPS is finding its way into cars, boats, planes, construction equipment, movie making gear, farm machinery, even laptop computers and all mobile stations. A GPS signal contains exact information of e.g. the position of a GSM-phone.
GPS provides two levels of service, Standard Positioning Service (SPS) and the Precise Positioning Service (PPS). SPS is a positioning and timing service, which will be available to all GPS users on a continuous, worldwide basis with no direct charge. SPS provides a predictable positioning accuracy of 100 m (95%) horizontally and 156 m (95%) vertically and time transfer accuracy to UTC within 340 nanoseconds (95%). PPS is a highly accurate military positioning, velocity and timing service, which will be available on a continuous, worldwide basis to users authorized by the U.S.
To make use of GPS, a GPS receiver is needed. Many different types of receivers exist and have become less and less expensive in recent years. A GPS receiver “listens” for the signals that are broadcast from the satellites of the United States Department of Defense (DOD) Global Positioning System. Each satellite broadcasts information that contains the position of all satellites in the constellation. GPS receivers use the signals in order to determine the position of the satellites.
Users need to transform position data into a plane (flat) coordinate system, either to merge them with another data set, to plot a map of the GPS results, or to perform further calculations for such parameters as area, distance or direction. GPS receivers can usually report position information in more than one format. The most common format is latitude and longitude.
Together, the Global Positioning System and GPS receivers provide the means for determining position anywhere on the earth. A GPS configuration comprises a GPS receiver and antenna, and software to interface differentially corrected GPS data from the receiver to other electronic equipment.
The identification of objects and phenomena in nature is usually based on knowledge or by using books or sites on the internet for finding the desired information. When walking in nature it is, however, not practical to carry heavy books or computers, and even if a mobile station with access to internet would be available, most objects can not be identified very quickly, if even at all, due to the extensive amount of alternatives in big databases. The identification of different objects in these databases is based on photographs (and sometimes high resolution scanning) of the objects to be identified.
Hence, there is a need for a method with which an object can be identified fast and reliably at site when walking in e.g. the nature.